Gardening and a new Author

Hey! So my friend Ryula wanted to show off her garden, so she’s going to start writing for this blog. She’s been doing some really cool stuff, trying to reorganize her back yard and get a huge vegetable garden started. I’ve been helping out from time to time, but since I have a black thumb, I’m really only good for manual labor.

So Soshi says that, but frankly her herbs are doing fine because she finally put them where they can get sun– it’s not her thumb that’s black. As for the manual labor, that just happens to be what happens before you can plant anything in an un-prepped area. ^^ Hi! I’m Ryula, and I’ve been stealing Soshi for a few days in the past week or so to help me do all sorts of yard work. Hopefully everything will go well and get done and look lovely when she posts pictures!

Here’s the soon-to-be vegetable garden. It’s a bit of a mess, but how else do you get things done? ^^ This whole space is going to be the vegetable garden. It’ll have squash, cucumber, radishes, chard, romaine, spinach, and so on. And since I’m helping, I get some! I’m looking forward to it.

The space where the vegetable garden is going to go needs to be prepped, and that’s been the majority of that manual labor we keep talking about. We’ve been digging ditches, laying down newspaper, and then putting stones and pots on top of it to make a border to keep the grass out. Here’s the start of one side, where we just put down some stones.

Then we have some large pots that she’s using to make the east border. We dug down a few inches before putting down the newspaper to make sure the grass doesn’t slip by. The newspaper kills the grass because roots can grow down, but leaves can’t grow up through it, keeping the grass from growing but letting the veggies that will go over it flourish. These big pots have tomato plants, eggplants, and a pepper plant.

This is what I helped with yesterday. I’m good at this kind of stuff. Don’t listen to Ryula. I have a LONG history of killing my own plants. This will be filled with smaller pots (seen earlier), and they’ll make the last part of the border.

Here they are. We’d lost the light at this point, so sorry for the dark picture. Only about half are in there so far, so we’ve got more work ahead of us. Plus there’s a little side project.

A bunch of the dirt we dug up from the ditch got moved over to the other side of the yard to make the foundation for a new raspberry patch. This is the crop I’m most looking forward to! There’s a bit of a hill here, so Ryula used the cinderblocks to shore up the bed for the bushes.

Isn’t it awesome! So now in addition to my ramblings about food and decorating my home and all that jazz, you can have some nice, informative posts from Ryula. ^^